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Over Katherine Fortin

Katharine Fortin is an Assistant Professor of public international law and human rights at Utrecht University’s Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM). The focus of her current research is the legal framework which applies to non-international armed conflicts

In June 2017, the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflicts published a briefing on ‘Armed Non-State Actors and International Human Rights Law: An Analysis of the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly’. In this blog post, I demonstrate why the briefing – and the data collected in the annexes – is an important addition to knowledge in this area that will facilitate important discussion of this issue amongst policy makers. In order to start this discussion, I highlight a few particular aspects of the report that I find most interesting and valuable. In doing so, I explain inter alia why I disagree with the authors’ conclusion that no pattern is discernible in how the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly address armed non State actors. I end the post by giving some suggestions about how the data collected by the study may provide rich potential for even further analysis. Lees verder →

On 13 September, Advocate General Wathelet published his opinion in a case pending before the European Court of Justice that raises several fundamentally important questions of international law. In particular, the Court is set to clarify whether the trade agreements between Morocco and the European Union apply to the Western Sahara. If the Court confirms that the agreements do not apply to Western Sahara, this will give backing to the long-standing argument made by the Polisario Front that Morocco cannot legitimately make agreements with foreign companies regarding the exploitation of Western Sahara’s natural resources (see here and here). The Polisario Front is a national liberation movement and has been recognised by the UN General Assembly as the representative of the people of Western Sahara (see here and here).Lees verder →